History Today

Les Invalides, Paris

Douglas Johnson examines the powerful hold Les Invalides exercises over France's historical mythology.

Gruyere's Cheesemakers

David Birmingham draws on the private papers of an 18th-century Swiss cheese farmer to recreate a world whose business sophistication and economic arrangements cut across the context of the rustic joys of an Alpine lifestyle.

The February Revolution of 1917

Sir Robert Bruce Lockhart had a distinguished career as a diplomat, writer and director-general of Churchill's Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War. But as a young diplomat and Acting Consul-General in Moscow, he was caught up in a chain of events that included being head of Britain's first mission to the Bolshevik Government, subsequent involvement in a plot to overthrow them, and imprisonment in the Kremlin - worthy of a novel by Le Carré.